Turning around to view the coast and the ocean that lay below me, I was astonished to see that the sun shone brightly there. Where I stood, the rain was coming down in bucket loads, and what a relief it was!

Instead of our usual early-morning hike into Kamantian, out of necessity, we were hiking into our jungle home in the late afternoon on a particularly hot day. When it is that hot and humid, the body’s energy drains away just when it’s needed most for the steep hour-and-a-half climb. What’s more, for me, hiking in direct sunshine is a sure recipe for a migraine.
As our group begun hiking that afternoon, I prayed, “Lord, would You please send rain?” Five minutes later, it began raining cats and dogs. Kent, driving a truckload of men to work in the lowlands, heard one of them comment, “Wow. Look. The rain is only coming down on the trail where everyone is hiking.” It rained until the heat of the day was past and we were on the shaded part of the trail. Thank You, Lord! As I hiked along, I contemplated God’s goodness, sought His presence in a greater way in my life and refocused on what He had in store for me to do in the mountains, at the heart of our mission.

I was still in a happy, prayerful, contemplative mood when we arrived at the river. My spirits fell. The heavy rain had transformed it into a foaming torrent. This was a big problem. You see, the trail doesn’t just cross the river and continue on. It follows the river up for a ways and crosses and re-crosses it several times. And here I was without Kent to help steady me through it. Looking at the muddy frothing water, I felt one of my deepest fears rising within me, and my mind went back a few short months to another river in flood.

It all began innocently enough. We were attending our daughter Stephanie’s graduation. Sheets of rain slowed the masses of traffic pouring into the convention center for the event. However, by the time her graduation reception was over, the rain had all but stopped, and she was still firm in her plan to take her uninitiated parents whitewater rafting on the Ocoee River. Determined not to cast a shadow over my daughter’s day of celebration, I repressed my memories of past traumatic river experiences. You’ve got to face your fears to conquer them, right? I comforted myself that Stephanie was a certified swift-water rescuer. Since she would be with us, what could go wrong?

At the river’s edge, our guide told us, “When I say, ‘paddle left,’ or, ‘paddle right,’ those of you on those sides paddle hard.” I hoped I could respond quickly enough to the commands. How many years had it been since I had paddled a canoe? But I pushed the thought aside. At least everyone else knew what they were doing, and I would eventually catch on. “People think this is fun?” I wondered to myself as I put on my flotation jacket and helmet and took my seat in our raft at the very front. I felt so vulnerable. I began praying in earnest. “Lord, I want to get out!” But my pride wouldn’t let me. “Face your fears!” I kept telling myself as a light mist began drifting down on us.

As our two rafts pushed off from shore, the water was smooth as glass. But before long, the real whitewater began. Our guide shouted instructions I could hardly hear above the roar of the river. “Paddle left, paddle right, paddle forward, or paddle backward.” I tried, but sometimes the front of the raft leaped so far out of the water I couldn’t reach the river to paddle. And then we would nosedive into a trough, and I would just hang on for dear life. I soon realized that sitting the way we had been instructed, up on the edges of the raft, could land me in the water in the blink of an eye, so I hunkered down inside the raft with my legs braced against the edges. “Lord,” I prayed, “I don’t want to go into that water. Please, Lord, save us!”

The whole world seemed to be going topsy-turvy. The raft lurched forward and back, nose up, nose down, tilting precariously to one side and then the other, all the while spinning like a top. We were caught in a whirlpool the river guides had named Grumpy. One by one, my fellow passengers were spit out into the river like popcorn from a hot skillet. What if I was the only one left in the raft? I had no idea what to do with a raft in white-water.

Around and around, nose down, nose up so far I feared we would flip over and I would be trapped under the raft, and then suddenly I was in the drink, too. “Lord, save me!” Glub, glub. The freezing water stunned me. I was underwater for what seemed a very long time, praying as I was thrown about, my body striking various objects but too numb to register pain. I remembered Stephanie’s last instructions to me: “Mom, if you end up in the water, just keep your nose and toes up. Don’t try and stand up, or you’ll get stuck and drown. Nose and toes.” But how do you get your nose up when you don’t know where up is? “Lord, save me! Save our family! Please don’t let me die on this graduation day. What a terrible memory that would be for Stephanie! And what about Jilin far away in the Philippines? Could she bear to lose another mother? Lord, what about our people? I don’t believe our work is done yet. Lord, save me, save us, if it is Your will.”
My head popped out of the water, and I gasped for air in the frothy waves as I continued my pell-mell dash down the river. I wondered how far it was to the ocean. How long would I be in this boiling, freezing soup? Could I live that long? I went under again. I desperately needed air! I came up again, and caught a glimpse of the riverbank rushing past. “Lord,” I prayed, “just get me to an eddy!” Over and over again I prayed. And then there was Stephanie on the bank! She was hunkered down and didn’t look very good. She, shouted to me, “Mama! Swim hard! Swim hard!” Swim hard? I could barely move, let alone do a stroke. I gamely tried to raise an arm and it flopped back into the water as I sadly shook my head. The look in my daughter’s eyes broke my heart. She was losing her mother, and there wasn’t a thing she could do about it. She was a trained rescuer, but she was also a victim.

As I continued my swift drift down the river, struggling for air, I grasped for something to hang onto. When I bumped into a fairly large rock, I tried to cling to it, but I had no strength, and the river quickly peeled me off and carried me away. “Please, Lord, get me to an eddy,” was my constant prayer. It seemed I was praying, shouting out loud, but I was so out of breath that I’m not sure that I could have been. But I knew my God hears the cries of my heart even if my mouth can’t form the words. Then I was nearer the bank, and the water washed me up against a small branch in such a way that I could hold onto it. I was in an eddy! “Thank You, Lord!”

I was gasping for breath. I couldn’t get enough air. I couldn’t move, and I couldn’t breathe. Suddenly Stephanie was there helping me out of the water and giving me a hug I’ll remember forever. “Mama,” she was saying, “I’ve got to find Christiana, Casey’s sister and two others in our raft.” She took off, thrashing through the brush and boulders along the river.

Air. I still couldn’t seem to get enough air! Then the second raft beached near me, and Timothy and Christina came rushing up the bank. They hunkered down on either side of me, trying to give me some of their body warmth. “Mama,” they said, “you need to get in our raft, and we will take you across the river so you can get into a car with heat while we go looking for Christiana.”

I had already decided—no, I’d promised the Lord—that I would never again set foot in a whitewater raft. “I’m not going back into that water,” I told them. I didn’t care if I had to walk hundreds of miles over boulders and brush to find a bridge across the river.

My kids were perplexed. What to do with me? Eventually the guide from the raft I had been in joined us and informed me that a dam upriver would open its floodgates in half an hour, and the river would soon flood even higher. At the thought of even more cascading water, my will buckled. “How can you paddle in that mess?” I asked. “It just carries you wherever it wants!”
“There is a place nearby where there is very little white water. It will be fine.”

I clambered into the bottom of the raft and sat down facing backwards (I didn’t want to see where we were going this time!) Soon I was being helped up out of the raft on the other side and lumbering my frozen limbs up the steep bank to the road and into the waiting arms of my husband. He had been badly banged up in an even worse whirlpool. Everyone was accounted for and had a unique tale of terror to tell.

As I looked back down to the river, I couldn’t believe my eyes. There was a woman in a kayak paddling skillfully back and forth in the rapids above where we had crossed over. Someone told me she had been loading up her gear to leave after her river trip when she had seen our predicament and launched out into the river again to see if she could do anything to help. Wow! What thoughtfulness. I pray a special blessing on her even as I write.

As we rode home, we were thrilled to be in each other’s company, telling and re-telling our stories. Learning that part of our experience had been caught on video tape, we watched the footage over and over in slow motion, picking out the various helmeted heads popping up out of the river, mouths agape, struggling for air.

It hit me that the devil had tried to take out four members of our family at once in an effort to stop God’s work among the Palawano. But God had saved us! He must still have a work for us to do; we must still be part of His plan. The thought energized and renewed me. “God isn’t finished with us yet. God has a plan to take the gospel to the whole Palawano tribe and its subgroups. Lord, I want to be a part of what You want to do. With Your enabling, we press forward!”

This was again my prayer as I faced the rushing waters of a flooded river on my hike home into the mountains of Palawan. I reflected again. Why do I put myself through these things? Why go to the tremendous effort to get into the mountains risking major injury and the malaria that will surely attack again; the distance from children, grandchildren, family and friends; the press of publishing projects to be finished; people to mentor and disciple; church members requiring discipline; far-flung schools to be visited on treacherous trails; patients to tend? Why do it? Because this is where God is working. And I want to be where He is working. So I face my fears and pray for the courage to do what God wants done where He wants me to do it.

Post script from Kent George:

The day after the rafting incident, we learned the Ocoee River had been running at near record levels. I believe that if Leonda had experienced what I went through when I was tossed out of my raft, she would probably have died.

Also, we learned that further downriver from where our trip so quickly ended there was a place that, under such conditions, is known as a terminal hole where, if you fall in, you are unlikely to come out alive.

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